You want great gaming graphics and super smooth 3D play? Don't want to spend a couple grand on a gaming PC? Look no further. This is your lucky day! We did the research for you and put together this list of parts all available at NewEgg.com at rick bottom prices. One order and about a week later you'll be gaming at today's highest speeds!
Next we add the brains of the operation to the shopping list. You don't want to skimp out on the CPU so we shot for the best in the "value range". Intel Core 2 Duo is still dominating the CPU wars and this Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz Dual-Core Processor is a great value at less than $165.00.
We opted for a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive to fulfill your storage needs. Hard drives are cheap and at 13 cents per gigabyte you can't go wrong with this hard drive.
We like Samsung DVD drives for their ultra reliability. Nothing worse than having to deal with a bad DVD drive that doesn't like a particular format of DVDs. The
SAMSUNG 22X DVD Burner Black SATA Model SH-S223F is great taking advantage of SATA bus speeds.
Everyone repeat after me... "Don't skimp on a power supply!" Believe me, the last thing you want to deal with is a starved CPU and motherboard. Today's PC components need power and this SLI Antec Neo Power 500 500W Power Supply will serve you well. $89.99
Finally, throw in as much RAM as you can afford. Our budget brings us to this 2GB kit from Corasir. CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM Desktop Memory is reputable and trusted by most over-clockers as some of the most robust chips you can buy. This kit is $40 but many have seen $10 and $20 rebates floating around. Google it and see if you get lucky.
There you have it! For a grand total of $704.88 (at time of this posting) you have a killer gaming PC. Okay you penny pincher, now go buy your kids a nice Christmas gift!
Merry Christmas to all!
We purchased a Magic Jack on a tip from a fellow tech blogger a few months ago. We were admittedly skeptical being that the only advertisements and marketing we saw of this product was on late night infomercials. The product claims to be a small, USB device that turns any computer with an available USB port and a broad band internet connection into a portal for ultra-low cost phone service.
The device is very simple. Slightly larger than a standard thumb drive with a standard phone jack on the other end. It really couldn't get any simpler than this. The software is embedded on the flash device and installs once the USB device is recognized. It will map two drives on your PC. You will be prompted the first time installing to setup your account and choose a new phone number. There are growing their list of available area codes and region exchange codes everyday. We found our local area code and were able to pick a number from a list of several dozen.
Once installed, you can operate your new Magic Jack phone one of two ways. A softphone software automatically installed, allows you to place and recieve calls from your computer using your PC's audio device (you will need a microphone and speakers). This works well with a decent headset with a microphone and is great for those extended calls with tech support.
The other method is to plug any standard phone into the analog jack and operate the phone as you normally would. We had a cordless phone set that broadcasts from the base to three handsets. This is an ideal setup for this type of phone service. You don't have to worry about re-wiring your house to push the phone signal from your outside phone company line to this new Magic Jack phone service. This allowed us to plug the master base station into the Magic Jack by the computer and place two other slave handsets throughout the office (or house).
Service quality was at first poor. We found the audio to be very low volume. After playing with the volume on the handsets we got it barely acceptable. Later we discovered there was a setting on the softphone software that controls the volume by clicking on the small "Menu" button. This brought the handset volume up dramatically.
Overall, this is a great alternative to home phone service and certainly your cable companies VOIP service. Most VOIP phone services will still run your between $20 - $30 / month. At less than $20 a year, the value is obvious. We found this to be a great solution to making international calls as well. Take the device with you when you travel internationally, and plus it in to a computer with high-speed internet and you can make calls as if you were still in the USA.
T-Mobile has entered the competition in a partnership with Google with their new touch screen phone. The first thing to note about it is unlike any of its competitors it has both a slide out keyboard and a touch screen. Both seem to function well. The keys are adequately spaced apart and have a great feel. Although the touch screen doesn’t measure up as well as Apple’s iPhone, it still gets the job done. The G1 uses an open source OS, which Google hopes will get developers to create software for the phone. It will feature applications similar to iPhone with Android’s market.
The phone features WiFi, a full html browser, and GPS functionality. It has one-click contextual search, which lets you search for anything simply by typing in something with the keyboard.
The phone comes with a 3.2 mega pixel camera that takes still images, but not videos. It also doesn’t have a headphone jack, if you want to listen to music you will have to get an additional adapter that plugs into the USB port. It comes with a 1 gig memory card that can be upgraded to an 8 gig, or even higher down the road.
This phone will be available in US retail stores October 22, 2008 for $179 with a contract.
Rating 5/5
